Tour loading comparison TW3 v TW4

Hi all,

I have put together two identical tours to test the loading speed between TW3 and TW4. The average pano size is 230kb and the whole tour is 3.1mb, so no large files to load on a decent connection speed. Granted I have used some of the new functionality of TW4 with the odd popup but nothing to affect download speed.


TW3

TW4

In my opinion the TW3 example loads like it always has with a slight delay until the first pano is loaded then the rest of the images load in the background so aiding a smooth transition from scene to scene.

In TW4's case, it seems to take longer to load the tour from the start and then each scene is loaded at the end of the last thus stuttering through the tour. Of course both run smoothly when loaded in to the browsers caches but it does not look good at the start and may put people off viewing the whole tour.

I would appreciate in any views and feedback regarding this.

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Regards,

Paul.

360Turismo

I'm glad I read this posting thread because I'm also frustrated with theTW4 loading speed.

When I started working with TW4 I thought it was great until I also discovered the load time was so much slower than my tours in TW4.  After reading this string of postings I went back, taking a VT I designed in TW4 and repackaged it using TW3 and wow, TW3 is maybe 5 times faster in loading.  Even I wouldn't have waited for the TW4 version to load if I was at my client's website. 

This needs to be fixed by Easypano NOW.  I've been looking for a new program and have seen some tour that have zoomable maps, which would be really nice.

If anyone wants to take a look at my comparisions here are the links.  Neither of these have full screen options but they have 35 scenes.  In these tours I've kept my 360X180saround 1400X700 at 150K.

TW3 version: www.go360media.com/gull4seasons3

TW4 version: www.go360media.com/gull4seasons2

Please Easypano, fix this problem.  Thanks, Tom

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www.go360media.com

Hi Tom, nasty I see what you mean. I have had this prioblem and the only solution was to use the slice option in Publish. This effectively slices up the opening images into low res JPEGs and speeds up the opening of the panos. I dont personally like it as some of my tours seem to be 15% complete before the full res image kicks in. But this has been the only way I have found to speed up the loading process. TW4 has some fantastic features mainly IMO the control over pop up's which are great but on a negative side I dont like the reduced on load speed and I dont like to way the files are output  - it was far more straight forward in TW3. 

Try the slice and let us know how you get on.

Cheers

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Hi all,

I'm pleased someone else has replied to this post to keep it near the top of the thread list.

EP; we all would be interested to know if you are anywhere near to solving these problems in TW4?

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Regards,

Paul.

360Turismo

Hi!
Is there any technical reason why something was changed so that the tours take so much more time to load? Why not keeping it as it was in TW3.0? I really do not know what or why it was changed. What is the advantage of that change? As far as I understand it has nothing to do with the improvements and nicer features TW4.0 offers us and we are all satisfied with. (most mentioned example on this forum: pop-up windows). Why not getting back as in 3.0, but keeping the mentioned improvements. Is that possible?
I think and hope it has to be possible.

Thanks, Martin

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Hi Martin, I think there must be a difference as I cannot use the same twviewer.swf in TW3 as I found out recently. I can only assume it has to be slightly different to handle the new functions as the viewer in TW3 does not work with TW4 output.

A real shame :(

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Hi, I posted my concern about the inferior load speed of TW4 compared to TW3 and Nerjaace suggested I use the slice option in Publish.  On the TW3 version on the example I have link to I did use the slice option but it seems to only load the individual scenes a bit faster in my opinion, not the speed of the tour's original loading.  I messed with this quite a bit.

 

I expect many of you have observed that when you slice the panos this will give you a lower res opening photo gilr depending on the percentage you ask for, then the sliced pano is split into 5 files.  If you compare the total number of bits between the sliced files and the file if you would get if you did not choose the slice option, the sliced files add up to be around 1/3^rd larger.

 

In the TW4 version something I think could screw up the load and computer system compatibility is in the scene labeling.  With TW4 if you name a scene ODowd Park the file is converted to odowd park.jpg.  I didnt realize that Windows or Mac recognized an apostrophe .  Another example is what happens if the scene title is St. Marys Hospital?  Does it kick it out because of the period?  There are plenty of St., Mr., Dr. and others that would have to be thrown out.  In the TW3 version the scenes file names remain the file names you assign it in Photoshop or wherever and they are not converted by the program.

 

Would either of these quirks have anything to do with the slow load time?  I dont know but I doubt it.  What about that little gradated radar view, would that slow it down?

 

Im going back and repackaging all my TW4 tours into TW3, which by the way, you can open a TW4 project with TW3 and you can publish it in the same directory but you get it in a _flashvr directory.

 

Thats it.  I feel better now.  Tom

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www.go360media.com

Thats it Tom get it all out :). Your quite right slicing does seem to only help the individual panos and not the initial loading. I reckon if a tour hasn't loaded within max 60seconds viewers are simply not going to hang around.

EP really does need to address this as clearly many users are not happy with it and just sticking with TW3. I have loads of plans for TW4 but sad to say I am waiting until it improves which at this stage I have every faith in EP that it will.

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I really enjoyed using TW4 with it's full-screen, drop-down and pop-up capabilities and I like the gradated radar that the colors can be changed so I hope you guys at Easypano get this slooooow load time straightened out soon.  I'd hate to see people saying "no thanks" to you and find an alternative.  I'm just glad I figured out that if I use TW3 the load time is fast enough and I didn't loose any clients because of TW4.

I see I had a typo in my earlier posting about TW4 saving pano file names.  If you save a pano with a title of O'dowd Lake, the file will actually read o'dowd lake.jpg, this is with an apostrophe.  Maybe Chinese doesn't use apostrophes.

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www.go360media.com

For file naming:

You must use only a-z 0_9 English letters, numbers, underscore and hyphen. No special characters or parenthesis should be used. This would include not using apostrophes, commas, periods, full stops and asterisks etc.

You can change the display name within the software to reflect whatever you like. Just not the actual file names.

Simply go to the Properties and Actions and rename your scene, thumbnail etc at this point. This does not effect "file" naming.

Regards, Smooth

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I think the unified character types is a function of the server operating system.

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/s/
Dave
Forum Moderator for
EasyPano - Panoweaver
Pano2VR


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